The 1,500 hours invested by the DNA Doe Project’s volunteers in the Chandler case illustrated both the potential and the labor intensity of forensic genealogy. Standard CODIS searches are essentially automated — a profile is submitted, a search is run, a match is either returned or not. Forensic genealogy is emphatically not automated. It requires human beings to build family trees, evaluate candidate identities, cross-reference documentary evidence, and make judgment calls about which leads are worth pursuing. The degraded nature of the Chandler sample made this labor-intensive process even more demanding, requiring the adaptation of standard techniques to work with fragmentary data.
The techniques the DNA Doe Project used on the Chandler sample — multiple rounds of sequencing on degraded material, uploading to GEDmatch for comparison against voluntarily submitted profiles, building outward from distant matches through traditional genealogical research — became part of the emerging toolkit of forensic genealogy. They demonstrated that identification was possible even from samples that had seemed too damaged to yield useful results.
The broader ethical and legal questions raised by forensic genealogy — particularly questions about the use of voluntarily submitted consumer genetic data in law enforcement investigations without the specific consent of the data submitters — were still being worked out in 2018 and continue to evolve. GEDmatch subsequently updated its policies to require users to opt in for law enforcement matching rather than opting out, a significant change from the default settings that were in place when the Chandler case was worked.
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## The Theories: What Investigators Considered